G4S disputes claims that transgender asylum-seeker had to share bedroom with man

Neglect, contempt and hostility — how the UK government really welcomes refugees.

Matthew's accommodation (John Grayson)

I was talking to Paul, an asylum seeker from
the Middle East in a G4S house in a working class suburb of Sheffield. Paul told me that one of
his neighbours was a transgender woman whom G4S had placed in the all-male
flats, forcing her to share a bedroom with a young Muslim man. The woman had
been teased as a ‘man woman’ but not apparently disliked or harassed.

Perhaps the Home Office and G4S were
following the example of the Prison Service, which has placed trans-gender women in all-male
prisons? One, Vicky Thompson, aged 21, was recently found
dead at Armley jail in Leeds, after apparently telling friends she
would kill herself if sent there. The Prison
Service argues it is ‘legal status’ ,not the assumed gender which determines
treatment. G4S had apparently gone one better than the Prison Service by insisting that a
transgender woman had to share a bedroom with a man.

Paul showed me the G4S attendance list where
there was a male name. He said that this was the woman. She had not
signed for a couple of weeks and no one knew where she was now.

G4S disputes Paul’s allegations. A company spokesman said: “We never put transgender asylum seekers in shared bedrooms. On the contrary in cases where an asylum seeker we look after identifies as transgender, we provide additional support including offering alternative accommodation in a separate unit.”

Jacob’s story

Jacob is nervous and agitated. “I can’t
sleep, I hardly ever sleep,” he tells me. His Rasta sweatbands hide scars of
past self-harming. His G4S accommodation is some of the best I have seen — a
newly converted villa in a Sheffield suburb.

Jacob likes the place and the staff who are
there during the day. He hates the CCTV cameras on the corridors and near the
door. “They’re just like in the detention centres,” he says. Jacob has been in
and out of detention centres, and the asylum system for twelve years. He
remembers the cameras in the G4S-managed Brook House IRC (Immigration Removal
Centre) where he was held on three separate occasions waiting to be deported.

But what he really hates and fears is being forced to share his bedroom. Ten
days before I talk to him Jacob had been discharged from hospital after he had
tried to take his life. His room is his own for now but a new resident is due
to be moved in. Jacob tells me he is very afraid.

I’ve
written here in the past about various indignities suffered by asylum seekers
living in Home Office accommodation provided by the commercial contractor G4S. Rats,
asbestos, cockroaches, have featured in my articles, intimidation too. Is being forced
to share a bedroom really so bad? Asylum seekers tell me it is.

Matthew’s story

An African political refugee, and
medical scientist in his fifties, Matthew has spent over a year in the UK asylum
housing system. He looks tired and frail. “I think I will be OK, this is the
second time the system and G4S have tried to kill me,” he tells me.

Matthew was recovering from his second heart
attack since he had entered the UK asylum system. I met him in his G4S flat, on
the edge of a suburban council estate in Sheffield, sparsely furnished with
second hand chairs and table (pictured above).

He had arrived in 2014 when
international security companies G4S and Serco, who manage detention centres and
provide asylum housing in the UK, were overwhelmed
by the growing numbers of new asylum seekers. The Home
Office was telling them to use hotels. Matthew was sent first to the overcrowded
and seedy Heathrow Lodge, then to a Birmingham budget hotel because the
Birmingham Initial Accommodation Centre (IAC) was full.

“In the Heathrow place it was just packaged
sandwiches we were given, with occasional out of date cartons of yogurt,” Matthew told me. “In
Birmingham it was the same one hot meal — chicken curry, rice and salad — every
single day, for two months, through November and December, young children of
three years old had the same meals. We had to eat round the back of the hotel in
a freezing room out of sight of any other guests — the owners said we were
dirty and ‘not normal’.”

The approach to Matthew's accommodation

Matthew helped to organise protests about the
food, and about the failure of the heating and hot water which meant men, women
and children going down two floors to the gym for a shower.

“When I rang G4S they told me the Home Office
paid for only one hot meal,” Matthew tells me. “When I tackled the hotel owners
they said they would report me, and protesting would affect my asylum claim. When
I demanded some space for activities for the children they told me the daily
one and a half hours’ access to the lounge was all anyone could have. So twice
a week I took the young people on a one mile walk to a church hall who gave us
space, and I started English classes.”

“The small hotel was often overcrowded with
seventy to ninety asylum seekers there, never less than forty-five. We had to
share our rooms, two and sometimes three to a room.” Matthew told me he had
suffered from a heart condition since 2008 and he carried lots of his
medication into the asylum system.

The
first heart attack and then the bed bugs

“The constant pressure and insulting,
degrading treatment finally had its effect on me. Early in December I
recognised the symptoms of a heart attack and went to the main Initial
Accommodation Centre building to get referred to hospital. They offered me
paracetamol and sent me away. At the door a G4S driver saw I was in pain and
decided to drive me to hospital, when he left me there he said G4S might refuse
to pick me up after treatment so I had to ring him. I had treatment and spent
three days in hospital and sure enough on the Sunday when I was discharged I
rang G4S and they said that I would have to wait till Monday. My friend the
driver came for me in his own car.”

After three months in ‘temporary’ holding
accommodation Matthew expected to be ‘dispersed’ to asylum housing. Instead he
was sent to Urban House (another Initial Accommodation Centre) under the walls
of Wakefield high security prison. Again a shared room, this time bunk beds.

“I had no medical check for the first three
weeks,” Matthew says. “Things just got worse. I was getting bitten by bed bugs.
In my university I am a parasitologist, I have lectured for eighteen years
about disease-carrying insects. I knew bed bugs would affect my medication. In
Urban House they hadn’t a clue. Over four days they refused to really do
anything effective. They sprayed my room with pyrethrum which has no effect on
bed bugs. In the end I went out and bought bleach and washed the bedclothes and
could find only one dryer working in the whole building. That place should be
investigated — bed bugs can easily spread into the community around the
centre. The staff in there are authoritarian and insulting. I was mocked
because I love to dress neat — you think
you work here? they said sarcastically.”

G4S asylum housing in Sheffield was no real
improvement. Matthew was put in a three bed roomed terraced house. “I was
forced to share a room with a twenty-one-year-old smoker from Chechnya,” he says.
By now he was pleading with G4S. His
doctors wrote asking for a single room as his blood pressure soared. After
three weeks the young man was moved and so was Matthew.

“G4S played another trick on me. They first
moved me to a clean single room near to the city centre and my doctors. They
then came again after twenty-four hours and said it was a mistake.

“I was moved to these flats miles out of the
city centre, again to a shared bedroom. At first I simply refused to move in,
they shouted at me and started taking my bags and saying I could sleep on the
streets then. I now live a four miles round trip from hospital services and a
mile walk to the only post office designated to pay me my support.”

Resisting
the asylum system and G4S

I had heard that Matthew was volunteering to
speak to groups about being an asylum seeker; I asked him about this. Matthew
told me of a meeting with a women’s business forum. “I went there with a Yemeni
asylum seeker – she had worked for the IMF and been an adviser in the Yemeni
Finance Ministry. Not surprisingly the people there said that they didn’t
realise that asylum seekers were people like us!”

Matthew was also keen to volunteer to help in
the Sheffield campaign to get Sheffield City Council to stop G4S forcing asylum
housing tenants to share bedrooms. The campaign had already sent a petition to
the council meeting and the council had agreed to refuse to licence any new G4S
HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation) where unrelated residents were forced to
share bedrooms. In one slum HMO I had investigated G4S and the private landlord
who supplied the property were set to receive over £28,000 over the year from
the Home Office for housing nine men in shared rooms. G4S therefore was
unwilling to stop bedroom sharing in their existing properties. In one house
where there had been protests they posted the “G4S Golden Rules” one of which
read:

“Room Sharing Everyone has to share a room. You will be
given a roommate at some stage and must accept them. They will be selected for
you and you have no right to request a different roommate.”

Asylum seekers and activists from SYMAAG asked
for a meeting with the chair of housing at Sheffield City Council. We wanted to
find a way of ending all bedroom sharing in G4S accommodation. Matthew was part
of the delegation, and his testimony proved crucial in finally ending room sharing
from 31 October.

I last saw Matthew at a public meeting where
he sought me out to say that he had been offered a ‘political’ appointment in a
university in his home country. “Don’t worry, John,” he said. “I will get protection there, and I am just
very glad to get out of this asylum system. Here the system was so demoralising
for me. It made me feel like a criminal, not someone seeking safety.”

And
if refugees do manage to get to the UK…

In September in these same flats where
Matthew lived, a young Eritrean man had spent a few weeks in one of the shared
bedrooms. He had come across the Mediterranean from Libya to Lampedusa across
Europe through Calais and then to the flats in Sheffield. The Home Office had
discovered he had been fingerprinted at Lampedusa - and deported him to Italy
via Morton Hall Detention Centre in Lincolnshire. Apparently as other asylum
seekers were helping him to pack his few belongings he cheerily told them: “I’ll
be back soon.”

Dozens of young Eritreans like him find
themselves in Urban House in Wakefield, still in their dirty and torn clothes
from Calais. Urban House provides no replacement clothing; local charities in
Wakefield have to appeal for donations of clothing, shoes and packs of new
underwear. One charity worker I spoke to said. “What we really need are packs
of new underwear for the men, Urban House refuse to supply them, G4S say the Home Office did not specify
this in their contract"

Around
England

Again the UK asylum system is responding
badly to the very modest increase in those managing to get into the country.
The Birmingham IAC is full and hotels are again being used. Serco is transporting
people by stretch limousine across the country to budget
hotels in Lancashire. Families are still being
forced to live in appalling asylum housing. Natasha Walter recently reported on
'Jane'
an asylum seeker from the Congo (DRC) in London where

“The housing provided by the Home Office is
one room where she and her two children sleep in the same bed, infested with
cockroaches and freezing cold.”

The Conservatives and UKIP majority on Portsmouth
city council have recently not only rejected the idea of
taking Syrian refugees, but have decided to opt out of taking asylum seekers at all. At
present Home Office contractor Clearel houses 124 asylum seekers in the city of
210,000 people. The Council argues that they put too much pressure on local
schools in fact only eighteen of the asylum seekers are children, and none of them
go to schools in the city.

The asylum rules are being tightened and the
process becomes more brutalised. The Immigration
Bill before parliament has a proposal that
everyone who claims asylum will immediately be considered as ‘on bail’ just as
if they were criminals who have been charged with the offence of claiming
asylum. For many years migrants and refugees have been labelled as ‘illegals’,
and criminalised, now the label is to be confirmed in parliamentary statute.

The other week I met with Barbara in
Barnsley G4S asylum housing. She had been wearing her degrading tag since June.
Barbara had been moved yet again to another asylum house with seven other women
— and yet again forced to share a room. The Home Office refuses to disclose
to me, through FOI questions, when they started tagging asylum seekers and how
many are wearing their electronic shackles. Their response:

“to extract the information that you have
requested would only be possible at a disproportionate cost.”

Perhaps the Home Office faced with repeated
protests and mass demonstrations at Yarl’s Wood, and escalating cuts to its
budget, is following recent developments in the USA where federal courts have
freed undocumented women from detention on condition that they wear tags as
part of the ‘Intensive Supervision Appearance Program’. Estimates suggest that an
‘ankle monitor’ costs the authorities $4.50 a day compared with $260 a day for
detention.

The UK government’s real view of refugees was surely
betrayed by David Cameron's comment about the “swarm” of
them at Calais. The British government had fences, barbed
wire, and riot police guarding its border on French soil at Calais many years
before the Hungarians ‘shocked’ Europe with theirs.

After the Paris killings, media
reporting, linking the attacks to refugees seeking
safety in Europe, threatens the UK peoples present welcoming mood towards
Syrian refugees and asylum seekers in general. The government-led ‘hostile
environment’ might just be getting even more hostile.

Note:

For their protection, asylum seekers’ names have been changed.

26 November 2015. This article has
been amended since publication to make clear that G4S disputes the allegation
regarding an asylum-seeker who identified as transgender, and to include the
company’s response.

About the author

John Grayson is an independent researcher and adult educator. He is an
activist and campaigner with SYMAAG (South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum
Action Group). He writes regularly for openDemocracy and for the Institute of
Race Relations news service www.irr.org.uk

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